FUTURE SOCIETIES FOUNDATION

In order for businesses to develop valuable products and services that will create a positive impact, we believe it’s important to test and demonstrate innovative solutions in a controlled real-life environment. Future Societies - CityX launching a new program to enable companies and local governments to develop, test, and demonstrate products and services in real-life settings at different scales. We’ve established three testing environments to achieve this:

Urban Cities Testbed

CONNECT . SPARK . ACCELERATE

The Building Testbed:

We’re turning our Urban Innovation Centre (UIC) into a testbed, providing a real-life setting where Local SMEs can test and demonstrate their products and services in a controlled, single building environment.

 

The UIC testbed will enable companies to test and monitor elements such as noise, energy use, room temperature, and air quality. Not only can we provide access to our building and its occupants, we continuously monitor many elements, allowing us to measure behaviour patterns of our staff and visitors. These data provide a useful baseline to evaluate the performance of new building technologies.

CityX

The City Testbed:

It can be hard for cities to test innovative solutions on a small scale due to the risk of failure. This can limit the possibilities of developing new solutions for common city challenges. It’s also difficult for SMEs to reach cities and work with them to develop, test, and demonstrate innovative solutions on a small scale.

 

For this reason, we are in conversation with a number of state's boroughs to collaboratively shape our City Testbed. And we are now reaching out to cities that are interested in working with us to identify challenging areas that require new products and services (if you are a city or borough and want to get involved please get in touch with us: testbed@futuresocieties.org Besides our partnership with cities, we also want to connect with SMEs that are developing urban solutions –  with relevance to local businesses, citizens, transport and wellbeing/health.

Immersive Testbed:

We’ve partnered with Igloo Vision, turning their Virtual Reality (VR) cylinder into a permanent Immersive Testbed and Showcase in our building. Some early ideas that are still in the concept stage – especially in cities – and are not yet ready to test in a real-life setting; others have work that solely exists in a virtual environment. The Immersive Testbed will allow SMEs to showcase work and use the space for research, design, and workshops. It also offers the potential to simulate a city or the interior of a building, allowing SMEs to explore and test their ideas in a low-risk virtual setting before they implement them in the real world.

Future Societies - CityX and the partners involved will provide SMEs with a physical space to test and showcase their products and services.

 

SMEs involved in any testbed will have a designated space within the UIC, such as access to Makerspace and/or co-working area.

 

As part of the testbed program, we will provide SMEs with the opportunity to showcase their products and services and connect them with high-profile industry partners. There will also be interactive workshops and networking events providing opportunities to network and establish industry connections.

 

 

 

© 2022 Future Societies Foundation

Future Societies Foundation, an international is an independent 501(c)(3) nonprofit think-and-do tank that connects smart cities across the globe with innovations and insight to drive resiliency, equity, and sustainability. We believe that a methodical approach brings about the most transformative change.